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Topic: Why M&F peaked so young (Read 1976 times)

I've been toying with a system for another thing of mine that would enable people to have conflicting information, but it'd be non-trivial to implement on M&F.

That said, I do like displaying the knight offers on the public map, but I don't think it's as trivial as just adding a line to map.js to load knight offers. I tried this, it did nothing. Might have to set the game up so that if you're not logged in it redirects to a different map, rather than the one used everywhere else. If we did that, then it should be pretty easy to load up knightoffers. Map.js needs some rework anyways, as there's no reason to load roads on the char start screen.

That said, I do agree with De-Legro. It's too easy to know things. Only lords shall know total populations of settlements at a glance. This should make it FAR more interesting for collecting taxes. It may also encourage or discourage town halls (which maintain the stats on population).

When deciding which information to obfuscate, and how to do that, one big issue is to think carefully about how this effects game balance. e.g. a single player with two paid accounts, 20 characters can know a lot at once. They can run the core of a whole empire, and they get economies of scale of information gathering. And this is before we consider any additional obfuscation.

Obfuscating things for non-lords could, if not handled carefully, massively increase the relative advantage of those continent-scale players vs nations that divide out the lands between multiple players. There are already logistical and intelligence-gathering disincentives to splitting up lands with more players. Poorly conceived obfuscation of information could make those disincentives greater.

e.g. perhaps if things are obfuscated, we should limit the amount one knight can know. e.g. a lord with a single far-flung holding on the other side of the world shouldn't have minutae information about the daily running of that town. Then, the benefits of passing that to an underling to manage would be more balanced against the costs: the place was so remote that it was hard to maintain up to date information on what's happening there, anyway.

That's doable, we'd just need to decide on the distance or rules. You could do distance, or current realm they're in, or any number of things. (Yes, it is possible to find the current realm someone is standing in.)

When deciding which information to obfuscate, and how to do that, one big issue is to think carefully about how this effects game balance. e.g. a single player with two paid accounts, 20 characters can know a lot at once. They can run the core of a whole empire, and they get economies of scale of information gathering. And this is before we consider any additional obfuscation.

Obfuscating things for non-lords could, if not handled carefully, massively increase the relative advantage of those continent-scale players vs nations that divide out the lands between multiple players. There are already logistical and intelligence-gathering disincentives to splitting up lands with more players. Poorly conceived obfuscation of information could make those disincentives greater.

e.g. perhaps if things are obfuscated, we should limit the amount one knight can know. e.g. a lord with a single far-flung holding on the other side of the world shouldn't have minutae information about the daily running of that town. Then, the benefits of passing that to an underling to manage would be more balanced against the costs: the place was so remote that it was hard to maintain up to date information on what's happening there, anyway.

No. If there is an advantage conferred by single accounts with large amounts of land, it should be countered in other ways, for example a corruption system that actually has relevance. The fact that we have relatively few large land holders, and that those that do exist get consistently whipped by realms like Hawks speaks to the fact that such large networks don't confer the absolute advantage people think they do. What they do however is limit game interaction between players which is detrimental.

That said as I mentioned in Discord, the obfuscation should make sense. It is reasonable to expect that counts, Duke Kings etc have some level of knowledge about the lands they hold dominion over. Exactly what that entails, and if there should be differing levels depending on if the Lord is your direct vassal or not I am not sure. Perhaps also this would give libraries more of a purpose, allowing for controlled information distribution within a realm.

As you can see I don't generally post here, or on any forums given their predilection to simply be cesspools of insults. However if we are talking why the game struggles to attract players I can share my experience so far. I joined the game through a knight offer, my liege says little to me but sets me up with some of his scrub land estates and tells me to go and claim some of the better slumbering estates nearby, which I do before being told by others in the realm that I have claimed too many, despite not even hitting the settlement restriction for two characters on a free account. My liege then decides he had enough and quits. Next thing anyone says to me is that I am supposed to give up all my land to some other character because I didn't realize that with my liege leaving I was supposed to organize an oath to someone else in the hierarchy. Least when I point out that I had no idea they relented and tell me to travel to their settlement to give an oath which I do. However I was not active in this supposedly casual game for 6 days and receive this

by redacted on 16-44-6 (February 6, 2018 21:09) Lord redacted I certainly would like to trust you, but the situation at current has become quite volatile due to attacks by redacted and my ill advised advances towards Lord redacted. If the redacted move because you are here watching my movements I will have no choice but to question your loyalty. You have not responded in quite a while and sound quite similar both to Sir redacted and Sir redacted before you. Please respond and join us in arms! May the Gods back our cause.Lord redacted of redacted

If that is at all indicative of the state of the game in other realms no wonder you have a problem. Quite possibly there is a good historical reason for people to be so paranoid, but quite plainly if you can't move past it, you have next to no chance of being able to grow your numbers. My experience in a second realm is only slightly better, my direct liege there at least talks, but the rest of the realm is actively hostile or dismissive of anyone that isn't part of the top hierarchy.

So, I've a few ideas to address these problems, and yes I recognize them as such. Firstly, the new player arrival experience needs changed, and I've talked about this elsewhere. If I had more time, I'd repeat it here. Basically, arrival to the realm as an unaligned, but part of the realm, first one, then choose from there, with having already gotten some sort of brief on what the realm is like.

Second, with that first change, you'll no longer drop out of the realm if you liege quits/dies/whatevers, as the game will track what realm you're part of via a new primary means of figuring it out.

Third, I'm looking to get away from this whole fear of unknown people a bit by adding dynasties, which will be the next major update after this one. I can't gaurantee it'll make people less paranoid, but it should make it easier for them to trust people.

As far as trusting people goes, if someone wants to make a separate topic about that, I'm all ears (or eyes, as is the case here). If someone has given some thought about how we can prevent spies from learning things so easily or has some idea about how we'd encourage people to not be so paranoid, I'm willing to hear about it.

Regardles, Ayruin, I'm sorry that's how the experience in your first two realms went. It's not an attitude I encourage, but I'm only seriously active in one realm.

I mean when more than half of the people who take Knight Offers are spies, its a problem.

How do you prove someone is a spy and not just one of the 90% of characters that simply never talk. Or am I looking at it wrong and 90% of characters are really spies? Honestly this sounds like more then a little hyperbole. Either that or all the people taking Hawk knight offers are just terrible, terrible spies. Though I suppose we might simply be terrible at determining they are spies.

Yeah when my last knight never answered and literally ran around with the people raiding my settlements it pretty much confirmed that person was a spy.

Someone running around with the Hawk raiders? First I heard of that. The main thing I heard during their raid in Ascalon was they were constantly worried about imminent starvation and couldn't group together enough to properly support each other.